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We're Going to Australia

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We're Going to Australia Talk given at the National Gallery of Australia, 12 March 2011, in conjunction with the exhibition Ballets Russes: the art of costume The text of this talk has been modified and adapted to accommodate copyright restrictions associated with some images, audio clips and film footage. No audio-visual material is included with this text although I have transcribed all audio interview material used (with the exception of the Kochno interview which is translated and transcribed in part only). Two audio clips appear separately on the home page associated with this talk: http://michellepotter.org/papers/ballets-russes-were-going- to-australia. Film footage from the National Film and sound Archive referred to in the text comes from the Ewan Murray-Will Ballets Russes Collection, especially title 262798. PowerPoint slides used in conjunction with the text during the live talk have been inserted into the text in the appropriate places. ‘We’re going to Australia’: the Ballets Russes Down Under Michelle Potter I have called my talk ‘We’re going to Australia’ and I want to explore the adventurous journey of the Ballets Russes dancers to the other side of the world, and to recount some of their impressions of and thoughts about Australia. But I want to start in Venice, where Diaghilev, famed founder of the Ballets Russes, died in 1929. I am going to begin by playing an extract from an interview recorded by Radio France with Boris Kochno. Kochno, a poet and librettist, met Diaghilev in 1921 and became his secretary shortly after they met. You see him on the slide below, top left, with Diaghilev in Monte Carlo in 1928. Kochno also wrote scenarios for a number of Diaghilev ballets including Zéphire et Flore, Ode and Le Bal. And you see on the same slide two costumes currently on display in the Gallery’s sumptuous exhibition, Ballets Russes. The art of costume, one from Ode and one from Le Bal. Kochno was present when Diaghilev died and in the recording he describes that very moment in the Grand Hotel des bains de mer on the Lido in Venice. The recording is in French but it is so evocative a recording that I think even if you don’t understand French you can sense the heaviness and drama in Kochno’s voice. And I have translated the salient points on the slide below. I have begun in this way because it leads me into an explanation, if a little simplified, of the term Ballets Russes. I have made a diagram, which you see on the slide below, of what I am about to explain. The phenomenon known as the Ballets Russes began with Serge Diaghilev and most of the costumes and other items on display in Ballets Russes: the art of costume relate to that period between 1909 and 1929 when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was the talk of the dance, art, music, design and fashion world in Western Europe. When Diaghilev died the situation became somewhat complicated. Many of his dancers and staff wanted to keep the company going and there were some attempts to do this. But none was really successful on a long term basis. However, over the next decade two new initiatives developed, in somewhat of a rival fashion, which did have ongoing lives. One company, which toured under a variety of confusingly similar names, and whose composition quite naturally changed over time, was led by a man believed by many to be a former Russian Cossack, Colonel Wassily de Basil, whose portrait you can see bottom left on the slide below. The other, which was largely an American-based company, was led by the impresario Sergei Denham, a Russian by birth whose family background was in banking. Both these strands of operation perpetuated to a greater or lesser extent the heritage of Diaghilev. It was the companies of the de Basil organisation that came to Australia three times between 1936 and 1940. So the Ballets Russes dancers I would like to talk about today are those who came with one or other of the three de Basil companies. You see the names of those three companies above. The image at the bottom right of the slide above shows, from left to right, Alexander Philipoff, who acted as a representative for de Basil when de Basil was not touring with his company; leading dancer and sister-in-law of de Basil, Nina Verchinina; dancer and founder of the Borovansky Ballet, Edouard Borovansky; Colonel de Basil; dancer Olga Morosova, who was also de Basil’s wife; and dancer Tatiana Stepanova. As I mentioned, these new companies perpetuated much of the artistic heritage of Diaghilev as well as developing their own aesthetic, and I will mention some of those links back to Diaghilev as I proceed. So, what did these Ballets Russes dancers think about coming to Australia? Many were very young. Stepanova for example was born in 1924 so was only 16 when the photo above was taken. Many were stateless having escaped from Russia themselves or with their parents during the Revolution, and only a few had previously visited Australia. Shortly after the first de Basil company arrived in Australia their publicist, a young lady by the name of Olga Philipoff (daughter of Alexander), wrote an article for the Melbourne weekly Table Talk. She wrote, very endearingly, about the reactions of the dancers on hearing in London in 1936 that they were going to Australia: Australia … Australia … the ballet may be touring Australia. This news spread among the members of the company in the last days of the usually brilliant season….and suddenly the trip became a reality when gentle Mr Nevin Tait brought to a rehearsal some Australian journalists to interview the artists. They told us with a note of homesickness in their voices “Australia … a beautiful country. You will like it.” From this moment on the excitement grew every day. Unable to control their joy the artists rushed to the shops, some buying summer dresses and parasols. And others spending their money on fur coats, the particulars about the weather being rather contradictory. However, rather than focus on the account of the publicist, as endearing as it is, what I’d like to do today is give you the impressions of some of the dancers themselves. You will hear the voices of Irina Baronova, Anna Volkova, Kiril Vassilkovsky and Kira Abricossova Bousloff, and I will read you some comments from letters written by Elisabeth Souvorova and Harcourt Algeranoff to their families back home in the northern hemisphere. On the slide below you can see from left to right Baronova, Volkova, Vassilkovsky and Bousloff and below Souvorova and Algeranoff. First Irina Baronova. Baronova came to Australia on the second Australian tour and she was hugely admired by audiences in this country and in fact continued to be admired and loved until the end of her life. You can tell I think from the studio portrait of her in the slide below that she had beautifully long and elegant limbs and a graceful line through the whole body. She was especially admired for her dancing in the second act of the symphonic ballet Les Presages and as the Princess Aurora in Aurora’s Wedding. She was also exceptionally generous of spirit and I think that quality comes through in her voice as she recalls her impressions of coming to Australia: You know it was very exciting because Australia seemed to me a country so far away, the other side of the world where people walked upside down. Probably to you we walk upside down, in Europe! And it was very exciting the thought to go there. The aeroplanes didn’t fly yet, over the ocean, in 1938 when I came. So it was on the boat, five weeks, which was naturally great fun and very interesting trip because you went through Gibraltar, and the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea. And you stopped at all those places for the day. Bombay, Ceylon, and finally Perth. It was interesting to see the new nature, the new animals that we only saw pictures of. I absolutely fell in love with the little koala bears. At every spare moment we dash to the koala bears because they hug you. They hold on to you and they hug you. Very quickly we made a lot of friends because we found the Australians so warm and open and they approach you. They don’t stand off and wait to be introduced or don’t talk to you. In England it’s difficult. Takes time. But here they come and introduce themselves and they talk to you and it’s always so warm and so hospitable. So very quickly in every town we made friends. In the extract you’ve just heard Baronova identifies three aspects of her time in Australia with the Ballets Russes. First, the journey by ship from Europe. On the right hand side of the slide above you can see a scene on the ship on which Baronova travelled showing a number of the dancers posing together on deck. And I just want to fill in a few more details of what the journey to Australia was like from letters and postcards written by Elisabeth Souvorova, one of the dancers in the corps de ballet in the 1936 company. She was an English dancer whose real name was Betty Scorer. In a letter from Port Said, Souvorova wrote not only about Port Said but about the problems faced by her Russian boyfriend, whom she refers to Alyosha, but who danced under the name of Alexis Frank and whom she later married while in Australia.
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